While Makoto Shinkai has only a modest resume to the time of this writing, he has devised a style of cinema and delivery of content that is consistently intriguing and visually innovative. Like Miyazaki and Rintaro before him, he instills a warmth and depth to his characters even as he produces creationist vistas that broach the boundaries of formalism, skewing perceptions of reality with elegant and striking aesthetic intelligence. With 5 Centimeters, he strips away the sci-fi peripherals of Voices and Places Promised, focusing on the basic psychological processes that underpin the thematic core of many of his works – namely fading communication, adolescent transition and the slow rifts generated by distance, implied in the title of the film both literally and metaphorically. The result presents us with perhaps his most personal project to date – and by all accounts, his most semi-biographical.